Since the mid-20th century, Iceland has developed its
own scene for contemporary classical music. Icelandic
composers went to Europe or the USA to study closely
with the musical avant-garde. Amazingly many of
these returned to their home country and developed
a style that unites traditional and folkloristic Icelandic
music with contemporary western music. After intensive
contact with Icelandic music and many trips
to the island of glaciers, geysers and moss, German
pianist Susanne Kessel now presents a cross-section of
Icelandic piano music culminating with an arrangement
of a song by Iceland’s currently most popular
musician: Björk.

New Music from Iceland

Icelandicity has something to do with landscape.
In my case, more like the smell of
landscape. It‘s the smell of heath. And the
sound of landscape: A golden plover yakking
from afar. Combine the above with the smell
of a carpet while seated in front of a huge Telefunken
piece of radio furniture and you get
an extract of my childhood. Listening to „Sjómannalög“
– mariner’s songs – and Icelandic
lieder in the national-romantic style common
to the output of the pioneers of Icelandic
composition. Then along comes the horizon,
also on radio: They started broadcasting contemporary
music from abroad. I recall illuminations
while listening alone in the dark.

Atli Ingólfsson

Susanne Kessel
about this album

When I traveled to Iceland for the first
time in 2005 to perform a classical piano
recital and carry out several interviews
with Icelandic musicians for German radio,
I first did some research on the country and
its people, culture and worthwhile sites. To
the great surprise of the Icelandic concert audience,
I had learned several Icelandic piano
works to play as encores. I knew a few names
of composers and of course, many wonderful
songs of the internationally known Icelandic
pop singers and bands. I also knew that
Iceland had a very individual and expressive
musical culture. But I hardly knew anything
about Iceland’s “classical music”.

I was all the more surprised when I found
meter-long shelves with scores of highly interesting
Icelandic piano works during a visit
to the music library of the Music Information
Center of Iceland. I had never expected
to run across such treasures!

Iceland’s classical music tradition is relatively
young. Within the fairly short period
of circa 100 years, i.e. since the beginning

of the 20th century, it developed in colorful
facets while incorporating almost all classical
epochs as in time lapse photography. The
music composed today in Iceland is oriented
to international streams of new music as well
as to old Icelandic music traditions, resulting
in a charming mosaic of various genres that
all exist next to each other.

I spoke with various classical composers
(Atli Heimir Sveinsson, Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson,
Árni Egilsson, Atli Ingólfsson and
Haukur Tómasson), with the director of the
Reykjavík Music School (Stefan Edelstein),
the choral director of the university (Hákon
Leifsson) and with the keyboarder, pianist
and composer of the pop band Sigur Rós
(Kjartan Sveinsson).

These musicians gave me insights into
the unique history of Icelandic music, told
me much personal information and continually
showed me how inseparable the Icelanders
are with their country and likewise how
burning their longing for international exchange
is. The great interest for everything
new, the openness to the foreign and unusual
is in my opinion a typical Icelandic characteristic.
Without this capability, the rapid
development of Iceland’s culture during the
past 100 years, and its achievement of an international
level, would not have been possible.

Iceland’s music history is a treasure trove.
Due to its isolated geographic location in
the North Sea, individual musical forms
remained alive over many centuries. The
Icelandic language has also remained nearly
unchanged since the “landnám” in the 9th
century (the settlement of the land by the
Norwegian Vikings).

Nonetheless noteworthy is Iceland’s
modern musical life. For its current population
of circa 300,000 inhabitants, Iceland has
the densest network of music schools in the
world. With help of European musicians who
immigrated during World War II, the country
developed an outstanding music school
system which offers children and youth a
very high level of musical training. A qualified
university study of music is also possible
in Iceland, although young musicians often
study in Europe or the USA. Many Icelandic
musicians and composers return home after
their stint abroad and bring their experiences
to the Icelandic musical scene, which has

achieved an international level within only a
few decades.

The first generation of young composers
who grew up after Iceland’s declaration
of independence in 1944 studied at the end
of the 1950s and during the 1960s at the international
centers of new music, in order to
get out of their island-isolation as quickly as
possible and experience the newest streams
of 20th century music. These two aspects –
“ancient” music tradition and “contemporary
New Music” – result in the unique pull between
the ancient and the modern that can
be repeatedly discovered in many compositions.

The wild nature of Iceland, its geysers,
waterfalls, its rough climate and the breathtakingly
beautiful landscape are an additional
source of inspiration that daily enters the imagination
and whose fascination cannot be
avoided by any artist.

In 2007 I performed again in Iceland,
this time during the “Dark Music Days” festival.
At this time, I had the idea of releasing
a CD of Icelandic piano music covering 100
years and various styles of the island’s classical
music. The Icelandic composers I talked
to were very excited about the project. Because
almost all classical composers compose
for the piano, this instrument is predestined
to present an overview of the country’s literature.
I was actively supported in my work by
many musicians as well as by the MIC Iceland,
and I would like to give my thanks to
all for the cooperation and the rehearsals in
Iceland.

I would like to thank both the City of
Bonn and icelandair for their support and
sponsoring. Thanks also go to Peter Gebhard:
the famous photographer and journalist
provided his wonderful photos of Iceland
for this booklet. Atli Heimir Sveinsson and
Árni Egilsson, as well as American composer
Leon Milo wrote new piano pieces for my
CD “Iceland”, and to them I owe special
thanks!

The Composers

Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson (*1938) is one of
the most influential personalities in Iceland’s
musical world. He studied piano and composition,
at first in Iceland and then in the
USA with R.G. Harris, K. Gaburo and L.A.
Hiller as well as at the Darmstadt Vacation
Courses. He teaches theory and composition
at the Reykjavík College of Music. He organizes
a number of music festivals there and
also works for the Icelandic Radio Broadcasting
Company as a writer and announcer for
programs on contemporary music. His opera
Grettir premiered at the 2004 Festival of
Young Artists in Bayreuth.

Þorkell Sigurbjörnssons dedicated the
Hans-Variationen to a pianist friend of his
named Hans Pálsson. The harmonies of old
Icelandic folk music are successfully combined
with the gesture of a virtuoso piano
movement. The abrupt, sparse harmony of
Icelandic music prescribed by the theme is
dressed up in modern pianistic vestments of
intoxicating colors and irrepressible joy.

Jóhann G. Jóhannsson is emerging as one
of the country’s best kept secrets. He is revered
by his prodigious Icelandic composers
as much as by international contemporaries
such as Daniel Agust of Gus Gus and Emiliana
Torrini, and artists from Björk to Sigur
Rós could surely recall his number one hits
on Icelandic radio throughout the years. In
1988, he received an Icelandic gold record for
his song Help Them or Hjálpum þeim which
he performed with a chorus of the country’s
premier artists as Iceland’s contribution to
the Live Aid relief movement.

The dreamy pop ballad Ég er að tala um
þig is exemplary for the outstanding quality
of Icelandic pop music. A simple but insistent
melody is harmonized naturally and with
self-assured taste.

Atli Ingólfsson (*1962) studied classical guitar,
theory, composition and philosophy in
Iceland. After publishing a volume of poetry,
he continued his training, first at the Milan
Conservatory with Davide Anzaghi, then in
1988 with Franco Donatoni at the Accademie
Chigiana in Siena and in Paris with Gérard
Grisey, whose assistant he became. Atli Ingólfsson’s
compositions are performed at many
renowned festivals.

The sentimental, romantic and highly virtuosic
…ma la melodia is actually untypical
for the young composer. Its romantic style is
a conscious artistic decision. The letters of
the Icelandic word for “cock”, represented
in musical notes, result in a sighing melody.
Such experiments, which are not necessarily
completely earnest, but which are pushed to
the limit, are part of the creative work of any
serious composer.

Haukur Tómasson (*1960) was awarded the
2004 Nordic Council Music Prize, the greatest
honor awarded to a Nordic composer. The
music of Haukur Tómasson is vibrant and
scintillating, characterized by intense rhythmic
activity, bright, colorful timbres, and a
keen ear for novel and effective instrumental
combinations. Tómasson´s earliest compositions
use the numbers of the Fibonacci series
to organize durations, intervals and formal
proportions (Octette, Eco del passato). His later
works (Spiral, Strati, Offspring) are examples
of the composer’s ‘spiral technique’, the
chaconne-like development of an underlying
chord progression. In the late 1990s Tómasson
also began using Icelandic folk material
as a basis for his compositions (Rhym, Long
Shadow).

In the piano composition Brotnir Hljómar,
chords are constantly subjected to
change. The abstract idea of “chord” is deconstructed
in all possible manners, rhythmicized
and goes through the most varied
moods and conditions. Although the piece is
not program music, Haukur Tómasson develops
a musical language with his pulsating
harmonies that inspires listeners to dream of
wide Icelandic landscapes, icy glaciers and
precipitous deserts of lava.

Atli Heimir Sveinsson (*1938) is considered
to be the most important representative of
Iceland’s current musical landscape. In 1959,
he studied composition at the Academy of
Music in Cologne with Günter Raphael,
instrumentation with Rudolf Petzold, composition
with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and
piano with Hans-Otto Schmid-Neuhaus. He
also studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in
the context of the Cologne Courses for New
Music, and with Gottfried Michael König in
Bilthoven. After completing his studies, Atli
Heimir Sveinsson returned to Iceland and
was instrumental from then on in making
contemporary European music known in his
home country.

Three completely different works by
Atli Heimir Sveinsson can be heard on this
recording. His collection entitled Oþur
Steinsins consists of thirty short pieces for
piano, each with an entirely different character.
Oþur Steinsins No. IV, with its magical
belcanto style, sounds a little like the beginning
of the second movement of Ravel’s Piano
Concerto in G Major. Af hreinu hjarta is
Atli Heimir Sveinsson’s musical setting of a
poem by Attila Józef. It is a slow waltz with a
pleasant, extravagant mood. The short piece
Albumblatt, with its hammering repetitions
that nervously stumble out of the rhythm is
an individual piece that Atli Heimir Sveinsson
wrote specifically for Susanne Kessel.

Victor Urbancic (1903–1958) was raised in
Vienna as son of a famous doctor. He studied
piano, organ and composition; his positions
included a post as kapellmeister at the Josefstadt
theater, which had just been reorganized
by Max Reinhardt. His meteoric career, with
many successful concerts as a pianist, accompanist
and conductor, came to an abrupt end
with Hitler’s 1933 seizure of power in Germany.
In 1938 – Urbancic was now Assistant
Director of the Graz Conservatory – he
was forced to leave Austria with his family
because his wife was Jewish. He received a
teaching offer in Iceland, where he then
taught theory, piano, composition and music
history. He also volunteered as organist and
choir director of the small Catholic community
in Reykjavík. His students include practically
a whole generation of Icelandic composers
who studied composition between the
late 1930s on into the 1950s. His influence
can still be felt to the present day.

The duet Brüderlein komm tanz mit
mir from the opera Hänsel und Gretel by
Engelbert Humperdinck is the theme of the
variation cycle Caprices Mignons über ein
Kinderlied. With great love of detail and differentiated
instructions for articulation, the
passagework in each variation becomes successively
more brilliant.

Jórunn Viðar (*1918) studied piano in
Reykjavík and continued her studies at the
Academy of Music in Berlin. She studied
composition with V. Giannini at the Juilliard
School in New York from 1943 to 1945 and
studied piano again in Vienna from 1959 to
1960. Jórunn Viðar is in great demand as a
piano teacher, pianist and composer in Iceland.
Her songs, which have a fixed place in
Iceland’s concert halls, are considered to be
particularly outstanding.

Jórunn Viðar’s Four Meditations on Icelandic
Folk Themes are played frequently
in Iceland. Two of these meditations can be
heard on this CD. Both are based on old Icelandic
folk music motives. Meditation No. 1 is
a theme and variations composed a little in
the style of Béla Bartók; in this recording, it is
seamlessly followed by Mediation No. 4. As in
a romantic piano etude, right-hand arpeggios
accompany the melody in the left hand.

Hafliði Hallgrímsson was born in 1941 in
the small town of Akureyri on the north
coast of Iceland.

He began playing the cello at the age of
ten and studied in Reykjavík and at the Accademia
Santa Cecilia in Rome. On returning
from Rome, he continued his studies in
London with Derek Simpson at the Royal
Academy of Music. The following year he began
compositional studies with Dr Alan Bush
and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. On leaving the
Academy, he remained in Britain, eventually
making his home in Scotland on being appointed
Principal Cellist with the Scottish
Chamber Orchestra. Despite his success as
a performer, the urge to compose became
stronger and in 1983 Hallgrímsson left his
post with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to
devote himself to this activity full-time. He
was awarded the prestigious Nordic Council
Prize in 1986.

Hafliði Hallgrimsson’s Lullaby on a
Winter’s Night transplants the listener into
a cold Icelandic night with a wonderful melody,
romantic harmonies and programmatic
tone-painting. The clearly set octaves in the
melody sound cool and icy; the gently dappled
pianissimo scales in the second part of
the work sound like delicate snowflakes or
like the long, luminous traces of the Northern
lights in a winter’s night sky.

Páll Ísólfsson was born in 1893 in Stokkseyri,
a poor fishing village on the south coast of the
island. He travelled to Leipzig in the autumn of
1913 and started his studies in composition with
Max Reger and organ with Karl Straube, the famous
organist and choirmaster of St. Thomas.
He was introduced to the organ art of Bach
and Reger, himself becoming an organist of the
highest order. Later he went to Paris for additional
studies with Joseph Bonnet. His return
to Iceland in 1921 almost certainly meant the
abandonment of the international career that
lay open for him. Instead he devoted his energy
and his exceptional musical knowledge to building
up of a new musical scene in the recently
emancipated and independend Iceland.

Páll Isólfsson composed in the style of
the great romantic composers like Robert
Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Frederic Chopin
and Max Reger. This is particularly evident
in the choice of the titles of his works:
“Albumblatt”, “Humoresque”, “Romanze”
or “Ballade”. His Impromptu in D Minor
quotes his own Piano Concerto.

Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson (1847–1927) was
Iceland’s first professionally trained pianist
and composer. He first studied theology,
and later composition, in Copenhagen and
Leipzig with Carl Reinecke. In the 19th century,
musical opportunities in Iceland were
still very limited, causing the composer to
make England his new home. Sveinbjörn
Sveinbjörnsson composed a great number
of romantic songs and poetic chamber music
and wrote the Icelandic national anthem
“Lofsöngur”. He returned to Iceland in 1922,
where the Icelandic parliament (Althing)
granted him a lifelong salary.

Vikivaki is an Icelandic dance from the
early 17th century. It was highly popular for
a long time and was danced at wild festivals
that might last up to fourteen days. In
the 18th century, however, it was banned by
the church. Many contemporary Icelandic
composers quote Vikivaki rhythms in their
works. In Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson’s version,
the dance is heard in a classical piano
movement and is reminiscent of lavish festivals
on Icelandic farms.

Árni Egilsson, (*1939), has earned an international
reputation as a Double Bass soloist.
He was brought to the United States by
the late Sir John Barbirolli to play with the
Houston Symphony Orchestra. A versatile
instrumentalist, equally comfortable in jazz
and classical venues he has recorded a classical
solo album with Vladimir Ashkenazy
and a jazz album with Ray Brown. Egilsson
is highly regarded as a leading session player
in the orchestras of the Los Angeles recording
studios serving as Principal Bassplayer for
most of Hollywood’s top composers. Árni
Egilsson has been a Professor of Double Bass
at California State University, Northridge. In
recent years he has become well known as a
composer of works for Double Bass, Chamber
Ensemble and Symphony Orchestra as
well as Solo Voice and Choral works.

The piano piece Borealis uses sounds to
describe a clear Icelandic winter night with one
of the most beautiful natural phenomena of
all: the aurora borealis. Árni Egilsson wrote this
piano work specifically for Susanne Kessel.

Jón Leifs (1899–1968) is one of the most
noteworthy and internationally recognized
Icelandic composers of the 20th century. He
uses elements of Icelandic folk music in his
works. In his efforts to create a musical language
that reflects Iceland’s cultural inheritance,
Leifs found material in traditional folk
songs, the “Rímur” and the medieval liturgical
ballades, the “Tvisöngur”. In 1916, Jón Leifs
followed two of his countrymen to the Academy
of Music in Leipzig. He was married to
the Jewish pianist Annie Riethof and lived in
Wernigerode and from time to time in Baden-
Baden, until he and his family were allowed to
leave Germany for Iceland in 1944. The story
of his life was documented in the 1996 Icelandic
film “Tár úr steini” (Tears of Stone).

Rímnadanslög are dances based on the
old-Icelandic Rímur, a rhyming tradition
performed in sprechgesang. Frequent meter
changes are characteristic for this art. These
changes arise due to the fact that not every
line of a poem has the same number of syllables.
The music orients itself precisely to the
number of syllables of the respective line of
text and breaks off at the end of the line to
continue with the next line of text.

Björk Guðmundsdóttir (*1965), is Iceland’s
best-known musician. She began her career
with classical music training. She took her
first music lessons at the age of five in voice,
piano and flute. She released her first solo
album at the age of eleven. Björk has been
a member of various bands, including the
“Sugarcubes”, which received international
acclaim. After this band broke up, she began
her solo career with the solo album “Debut”
in 1993. In following years she won thirteen
Grammy Awards, one Oscar and two Golden
Globes, one of them for her role in Lars von
Trier’s film Dancer in the Dark.

Björk’s songs are among the most fascinating
of the international pop branch. Unfortunately,
there are no piano arrangements
of her songs, and it makes no sense to play
only the melody line accompanied by a few
chords, because Björk’s music – in addition
to the sound of her voice – lives particularly
from its electronic effects.

American composer Leon Milo, a specialist
for electronic music, wrote a transcription
of the song I Miss You for piano and electronics.
The live-piano level corresponds to a second
piano-level that was created electronically
from live-piano recordings and which seems
to move through the room around the live piano.
Both levels are symbolic for the subject
matter of the song: a girl painfully misses the
one she loves. Only: she has not met him yet.

Leon Milo (*1956), American composer
and percussionist, creates music in which instruments,
electronics, natural and synthetic
sounds are unified. His works have been presented
all over the world and include instrumental
and electroacoustic music for the concert
hall, dance, film, television, radio, public
sound installations and museums. Having
received his Master of Music degree from the
Juilliard School, he worked as percussionist
and timpanist in orchestras in the US, Israel
and Norway. His major studies in composition
were with Professor Leonard Stein, William
Kraft and Luciano Berio. Invited in 1987
to the Sundance Institute in Utah to develop
film music projects, he now composes regularly
for European television and Cinema. In
1990, he received a Fulbright Fellowship for
composition study in Paris. He began incorporating
new technologies into his works and
soon after was selected to take part in the one
year course in composition and computer
music at IRCAM, Paris. Leon Milo and Susanne
Kessel have recently founded the Duo
“Pianowaves” – a Duo which plays works for
piano, percussion and electronics.

Professional photographer and book author
Peter Gebhard is among the most renowned
lecturers in Germany. The Leica Camera AG
has honored his slide-reportages with the
“Leicavision” rating. He tells stories in words
and pictures that are as far-removed from stereotypes
as could be, and in which his intensive
research and openness for the regions in
question and their inhabitants are obvious.

In addition to his live lectures, Peter Gebhard
has published numerous books and calendars
as well as photo- and text-reportages.
GEO, Stern and Merian are among the magazines
which have published his work.

His current and most extensive project
until now, panamericana, appeared in fall
2005 as a live multimedia reportage as well as
a large-format illustrated book published by
Frederking & Thaler. It was written after five
years of intensive travels, photography and
research along the fabled routes of the Americas.
The project was featured by renowned
magazines and on TV, and the GEO magazine
acknowledged it as the “Portfolio of the
Month”.

2006 saw the beginning of Peter Gebhard’s
cooperation with voxtours, the most popular
German TV travel magazine. In summer
2007, the photographer traveled to South
America with a television team for a collaborative
Voxtours reportage that followed the
tracks of his panamericana Project.

The photographs in this booklet date
from 2003 and 2004. They are taken from
the book Island – Insel aus Feuer und Eis (Iceland
– Island of Fire and Ice), published by
Verlag Weltsichten, Saalfeld.